The Making of an Olympian

Only by constantly monitoring an athlete and endlessly tweaking his workouts can a coach design a training plan that scientifically reflects the body’s response to stress. And that’s exactly what Doane does for Potts. Every day, Potts’s Suunto T6 body-monitoring system feeds Doane a minimum of 4,320 data points—his heart rate measured every five seconds for six hours—which Doane can either graph into a condensed chart or expand over 10 pages. Some days, Doane uses figures from Potts’s CompuTrainer Plus microcomputer as well, and that adds data points for wattage and cadence to the mix. “In terms of training, there’s nothing unique in the world—it’s just different combinations of how to put it together,” says Joe Friel, a triathlon coach and the author of The Triathlete’s Training Bible. “But Andy’s coach is monitoring him and making decisions on a daily basis, and that’s very difficult to do.”

In less than five years, Potts has morphed from an overweight former swimmer into a member of the athletic elite. His teammates are confounded by his rise. “We don’t really know what he’s doing. He’s a little mysterious,” Umphenour says. “We call him the Phantom Trainer.”

MUCH OF POTTS’S “mysterious” training takes place in the living room of his thoroughly unmysterious Colorado Springs home. From the street, there’s no indication that someone worthy of a Wheaties box lives inside. His front door is 100 yards from a Safeway supermarket, where he gets his 4,500 daily calories. The walls are lined with photos of Potts, his wife Lisa, and their toddler son, Boston. Most of the time, there’s no sign of a bike. “Lisa prefers that her home not be a gym,” Potts says.

But a part-time gym it is. Every morning after breakfast, Potts hoists his bike out of a closet, sets it down next to the coffee table, straps on his monitoring system, and starts pedaling. “Things are controlled indoors,” he says. “I can easily manipulate the conditions and guarantee consistent workouts that I can monitor and reference.”

Six weeks before the Tuscaloosa race, I sat on a red couch in front of Potts’s red, 14-pound Felt F1 hybrid carbon bike and watched this morning ritual. In the previous days, he had performed well, exceeding his target wattage outputs at low heart rates, so today Doane’s plan was pushing him repeatedly to hit 400-plus watts in a painful hour of intervals. Fifteen minutes into the ride, his legs were spinning 84 times a minute. An electric load generator on the back wheel applied 400 watts of magnetized pressure, creating the same level of resistance he would encounter if he were climbing a hill during the Tour de France. The room was muggy with his effort. Potts grimaced, stood up, and pumped his legs up to 106 rotations per minute.
Suddenly the room went dark.

“Shoot,” he muttered, and hopped off the bike. He looked around to see what else was plugged in. The fan needed to stay, because last year he melted his load generator while spinning at 410 watts. Even with the fan, the load generator is burn-your-skin-off hot. He decided that an extra lamp was the culprit. He unplugged it and headed out to the circuit box.